Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Vetch nodded as Rafello, his apron beginning to show the spills and drops of a night that promised to be profitable, got out a bottle of imported Vat 69 and poured him two fingers.

  Sabby blinked, his face slack but his eyes still wide with mad clarity. “Vetch.” Sounded like his tongue was a little too big for his mouth. “Hey, dintchu used to know the Rat?”

  Vetch watched the glass as Rafello slid it toward him. The barkeep raised his head, looking over the Tumbledown’s interior as if scanning for an empty glass or a troublemaking sod.

  Vetch hooked a finger around the bottom of the glass and drew it along, slowly, reeling the drink in. “Rat?”

  “Ashe. Skorryna* year ago blockside.”† Sabby blinked several times. “Wait, no. Was before you blew in.”

  “Heard about it.” Vetch considered his drink.

  A loud spray of laughter from the pollypleeths splashed against the walls. Rafello hefted the Vat 69 bottle slowly. Sabby turned back to his own glass, hunching and glancing at the mirror behind the shelves. When the barkeep finally lumbered away to the end of the long polished counter, Sabby didn’t move, but his lips did. Just a little, a jailbird’s whisper.

  “You goin’ in?”

  Vetch lifted the glass, inhaled a good long breath of whiskey. He said nothing, but his gaze met the ghost of Pooka’s in the mirror.

  The blond rifter closed his eyes, ran his fingers along the bottom curves of each glass lined up in front of him. One, two, three. “No. I ent gonna.” Four. Five. “You know wha’s in there.”

  “So do you.” Vetch’s lips didn’t move much, either.

  The unspoken addendum—that’s why you’re here drinking on credit, you bastard—hung between their shoulders. Vetch’s steady gaze didn’t alter, tracing the lines of Sabby’s ghost in the mirror. Above their reflection-heads, the bottles gleamed and glowed, each one with a bastard promise of liquid surcease.

  Wide-hipped, daze-eyed Cabra arrived on Vetch’s other side. She hitched one of those glorious hips up onto a spinning barstool and set her half-full glass of pinara* down. Her braids, starred with blue, red, and yellow beads, were wrapped tightly around her round, heavy head. A fingerswiped glare of white greasepaint slashed across her left cheekbone, a hyphen looking for another half to join it.

  Sabby’s head dropped forward. Six. Seven. Eight. One for every hour he’d spent in here, feeling the tingle across his nerves, loathing and craving it at the same time. “When?”

  “Soon. Poundside up.”† Vetch downed his whiskey all in one shot, and Cabra made a face.

  “You don’t even respect it,” she weighed in. No need to whisper now. “Light or heavy?”

  “Heavy,” Vetch said. Some of the other rifters in the bar stirred, sensing the change in the current. Just like lions at a waterhole, when a bleeding piece of meat staggers by. “One, Cabra. No more.”

  She nodded, sharply.

  “I ent gonna,” Sabby repeated.

  But Vetch dug in a pocket and flattened a battered, creased hundred-mark on the bar’s shining surface. Rafello, catching the motion, began to lumber back. “For his tab,” Vetch said, tipping his head in Sabby’s direction. Cabra laughed, a short unamused bark caught halfway through and strangled by her lips, as generous as her hips and just as sought after.

  She usually paid the Pooka’s bill.

  Vetch slid off his stool and stood, feet planted, his ghost behind the bar straight and tall until the shelves started at his deceptively lean shoulders. His ghost’s expression, though, lumped and distorted by the bottles, was just as hard as the flesh’s.

  Rafello swept up the bill. “Anything else?” The bartender’s eyes held avid little pinpricks in the center of the pupils, and there was a general movement for the bar.

  Vetch shook his head. He glided for the door, and by the time he stepped out into an icy sleet that nonetheless betrayed spring’s advent by splatting dully into mush instead of freezing solid, Cabra had already chosen the fourth rifter to make a team.

  Profits were all you could carry, and the word was to come armed.

  17

  JUST BY LOOKING

  An exhausted, icefog-choked sun glared at the Institute, and the rifter looked just as rough-tracked. Barko watched the skinny woman as she stood, her freshly shaven head cocked and her hands on her hips. Her dark eyes were bloodshot and her clothes were baggy, with creases that suggested they’d been in storage for a while. It was the closest thing to a uniform rifters had—armor-patched dungarees, a wide leather belt, layers on top: thermal undershirt, two flannel button-downs, a woolen coat with flexarmor patches sewn in odd places. Over the coat, the rifter’s hipbag—they all carried them, and all she was missing was a backpack. Since she wasn’t wearing the latter, she probably wasn’t planning on stepping right on in.

  “Not today,” she said, finally. Her thin, sharp-peaked shoulders came up, and she actually sounded disappointed. “Blur’s going too fast.”

  “Too fast?” He couldn’t help himself, repeating it stupidly. The breeze shifted, and he caught a whiff of metabolized alcohol, the fragrance of a pine bender. The stuff that made it taste like an intense but false memory of trees metabolized into sick-sweet sweat. Bechter had spent all night scrubbing out the leav, and was full of vengeance. Wait for four fucking hours without even a piss, then she starts screaming halfway to base and fucking vomits everywhere.

  Well, what had the dead-eyed, by-the-book asshole expected? A woman just out of prison and drunk as a dead dog wasn’t going to sing “Hello Piggies”* all the way home. Barko’s lab coat flapped, and he wished he’d put on a parka. Spring was right around the corner, but the wind still cut right through everything. His hands were numb, and he couldn’t help glancing nervously at the towers.

  “Yeah.” She pointed at the shimmering wall, flicking her finger back and forth, following a motion Barko couldn’t track. Slugwalls moved like the surface of a soap bubble, curtains of energy that looked thread-thin until you tried to cross. The rifters could somehow sense gaps in the curtain, and even when you hooked them up to EEGs while they did so all you could see was a queer clustering of brainwaves, never the same twice.

  You couldn’t put a rifter in an MRI. At least, not sober. Even those who might have agreed to it before going in and signed releases and contracts flat-out refused when they came out—if they came out. Not a one of them would say why, either.

  “You have to wait,” she continued, in the same flat, colorless voice. Her shaven scalp gleamed white, and the demarcation between the paleness and the gray of prison was a line as thin as the slugwall. All in all, though, she looked better than she had yesterday. Hungover was bound to be better than just-released. “Go back and tell Kopelund.”

  I’m a scientist, not a messenger. “He’ll figure it out when I don’t call for the rest of the team.” Barko realized he should have taken the excuse to walk away, and wondered why he hadn’t.

  It was an uncomfortable thing to wonder. It was also strange as fuck to be out here without the loudspeakers looping containment and dustdown protocols. Spending all your time inside the warren of the Institute, especially when you had a room in the scientist quarters instead of offbase, had gotten a lot quieter when the continual blaring admonishments had been switched off. Just plain shooting everything that came out didn’t require a list of protocols.

  A smaller Rift probably had that song playing constantly. Barko had more than once thought about putting in for a transfer, but always ended up deciding it was less hazardous to stay where he was.

  “Team.” A coughing scoff. The rifter’s boots were wrapped with tarnished stimtape over the instep. It took a long time in storage for tape like that to begin to discolor. “Plenty of rifters in town. And he drags my ass out of Guan.”

  “You complaining?” Barko found himself polishing his own scalp, dropped his hand with an effort.

  That got him a full thirty seconds of silence, and the rifter half turned, her dark eyes uncom
fortably sharp. She studied Barko from his busted-heel wingtips to rumpled, flapping lab coat, indifferent shave, and bald head, then glanced at the sniper towers rising from the ends of the U-shaped complex.

  She’s calculating. He couldn’t help himself—his mouth twitched, and she noticed. At least, he hoped the slight tremor of her own chalky lips over protruding teeth wasn’t just a sign of detox or psychosis.

  “No,” she said, finally. In this light you could see her irises, a shade or two lighter than her pupils, but it still made her gaze uncomfortably feral. “Just curious.”

  “Me too,” he admitted, hunching his broad shoulders. Standing this close to the wall, even if you had clearance, was dangerous. You never knew when some asshole in the towers would get nervous. They got a ration of engine-cleaner for every “intruder” shot down—pine, sliv, vodka, harch, whatever was on tap. Shooting at shadows was one of the few ways to relieve the boredom.

  Maybe that made her feel friendly. In any case, she spoke again. “You look like the curious type. Ever been in?”

  “Prison? Or the Rift?” Why was she bothering to talk to him? Kopelund had just brought her down, and Barko looked up from his morning coffee with a shot of carefully rationed high-grade whiskey to see the rifter, small and childlike, looking at the screens of moving data with a line between her thin dark eyebrows, as if she could see the ebb and flow of the blurline in them. Take her down there, get a time to go in.

  She made a soft plosive sound, as if his response was too stupid to be believed. “You haven’t been in there.” She jerked her chin at the slugwall.

  “You can tell just by looking?” Another stupid question. Of course she could. “But no, I’ve never been to prison.”

  She nodded and sank down to a crouch, rocking back and forth slightly, exhaling a formless whistle from behind her strong white teeth. Barko, now the tallest thing in two thirds of the yard, found himself tempted to sit down too. Safety in numbers, and making himself a smaller target.

  He waited, but the rifter didn’t speak. Just made those small rocking movements and kept whistling a little. “What are you doing?”

  “Watching.” A flat, colorless word. “Thinking. Go away or shut up.”

  Later, it occurred to him that he should have chosen the first option. He should have just walked away and left her there, instead of standing like a huge lumbering idiot, freezing himself solid and eventually turning his gaze to the slugwall. He stared, wishing the soap-bubble swirls would make some sort of reasonable, rational pattern.

  They did not, and the wind numbed every part of him it could reach so badly he needed a shot in his afternoon coffee, too.

  18

  YOU WORKED FOR IT

  Aleks might have hoped she’d notice how smoothly he piloted the leav once they left the guided tracks of the base, but she just slumped in the passenger seat and stared out the smoked window, her spidery fingers drumming randomly on the patch over one thin knee. She stayed that way for the entire way into town, other traffic—both wheeled and antigrav—parting in front of their obviously official craft. He set down in the government section of the square, and the whine of the leav’s generator powering down was interrupted by the rifter throwing open the hatch on her side. She was almost out of sight by the time he finished cool-and-lockdown, heading for Deegan Alley where the black market had settled, a residue of stalls and hawkers pooling in the shadows between two rows of rotten-tooth pre-Event buildings. Small and quick, she darted into the crowd and if not for her pale shaved skull and distinctive bird-hop gait, Aleks would have lost her completely.

  He had longer legs, and the hurrying buyers divided around him like water. When he caught up to the rifter, she was in front of a blanket mounded with all sorts of showy metal—creamers claiming to be silver, brass dishes and implements polished to glow in the dimness, flatware pretending to be genuine. Her head down and slightly cocked, she stared at the glittering, and the seller crouched spraddle-kneed on the blanket drew his lips back, exposing all-natural crooked yellow teeth.

  “You gon’ check mah sheets?”* the seller sneered. “Or you just wan’ li’l doshka?”†

  “What?” Aleks was abruptly aware of his cadet jacket with its yellow-and-red piping, clearly marking him as a government employee. Maybe he should’ve worn a lab coat. Did they know the two slashes on the sleeve meant scientist and not sardie? Now the behavior of the crowd made sense. Maybe they thought he was a soldier, looking to provoke a response to shut some of the hawkers down. “No, I’m a—”

  The rifter glanced over her shoulder, her dark gaze flicking over Aleks in that same swift contemptuous arc. “Blur it,” she said, not very loudly. “He’s just stupid.”

  Aleks opened his mouth to hotly dispute such an assessment, but someone bumped him from behind and hissed something suspiciously like shitfucker. It was a good thing he’d zipped and sealed his trouser pocket, or he might have lost his ident and whatever spare marks he was carrying. He’d heard the gossip about the pickpockets in the Alley, and just a month ago a sardie in full uniform had been found off one of the branching byways, his throat perforated and half his internal organs excised.

  There was a good market for meat, and Institute sardies could be assumed to be relatively clean. Except for their livers.

  “Fuckin’ reggers.” The man on the blanket shook his greasy, graying head. A kerchief, rolled into a rope and tied at his nape, kept his hair back, and Aleks wondered if he ever took it out to wash. The owner of the cutrate* near his parents’ ruthlessly clean flat in Kielce had looked enough like this guy to be his cousin. “You buying, or just scaring away all my custom?”

  “Neither, now.” Something in the way the rifter said it made the man drop his gaze, maybe because it was a good idea not to piss off anyone crazy enough to go past the slugwall. She turned, a military-smart movement, and pushed past Aleks, who was already hurrying to take his coat off. “Fuck that. They’ll smell govvie all over you, idiot, and you’ll lose your fur. Come on.”

  He hurried to keep up, pressing the seal-tab at his collar nervously. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to him. He searched for something to say that didn’t sound stupid. Govvie. Lose your fur. Rifter slang, and even though she’d been in prison, she was using the same phrases he heard in the Tumbledown when he sneaked in to drink and listen to rifter talk. He could nurse a single stein of oily lo-alk pitsch† for hours, hearing that slurring mishmash of terms and tongues. The sheer number of them drinking on endweek evenings was the surest sign that the snipers and machine guns and floodlights weren’t working to keep people out of QR-715.

  The rifters had names for every bubble. They called this one Cormorant Run.

  She plunged under an arch cobbled together out of collapsing rubble and into a twilit passageway where the real goods began to appear. Aleks hurried to keep up, but the rifter abruptly slowed and glanced back at him, again. “Stay behind me.” Even and flat, like she didn’t care if he heard her. “Don’t look up, and don’t open your fuckbuckle mouth.”

  Aleks clicked his teeth together so hard they sounded like poppers banging against each other on a tabletop, and nodded.

  She waited another few seconds, her well-worn stimtaped boots picking out clear spaces in front of her while her head was turned sideways, hopping from cobble to cobble with weird, mechanical grace. She didn’t even have to look down to walk, and Aleks’s head hurt, a spike through his temples. His feet had always been too big, especially when he’d first arrived at uni and tripped over everything—stairs, paper, flat ground in the commons. What was it like to just know where to put your toes, to have a body that small and neat completely under control?

  She finally made a clicking noise with her tongue and snapped her chin forward, and Aleks had to trot to keep up with her afterward. Raucous cries came from every side, hackers, jackers, and fences crying out in codes that changed from day to day, or even hour to hour, as hard marks changed hands and merchandise slid away
tucked into pockets or waistbands, bags of cloth or leather, small boxes or hidden folds.

  The sardies didn’t come in here. Aleks’s nape tingled, his heart hammering and his cheeks aglow. He was following a rifter through the black heart of Deegan Alley. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this back at the base, not even Barko. This was so much better than sifting through data on outdated tablets, or running seventy iterations of a Passek-Minor test on shit that came out of the Rift even before Kopelund brought Ashe the Rat on. It was supposed to be science, but it was piecework, and he couldn’t transfer out for at least another three years.

  This, though, was more like what he’d dreamed of. This was real.

  The rifter slowed, changed direction, walked aimlessly past one or two small plywood stalls. Aleks didn’t even realize they’d been followed until someone fell into step beside her, a heavy pair of boots with fresh silvery stimtape crisscrossed around the instep and holding the upper part together. They kept pace for a little while before the newcomer spoke.

  “You fucking govvies now, or is this bait?” Male, a trace of an accent scrubbing the corners of every consonant.

  “He’s still got his daddy’s runoff in his ears, Vetch.” The rifter’s tone hadn’t changed. It wasn’t even insulting, just a matter of fact. The tape on her shoes was tarnished, Aleks realized. He hadn’t thought stimtape ever went dark. Maybe it was oxidation? No, the profile was all wrong.

  A scoffing sound from the stranger. “Ashe liked ’em young, too.”

  “Easier to impress.” The rifter’s feet kept going, and Aleks began to try to step only where she did. He’d read that was how you were supposed to follow one of them inside a Rift. You had to even try to replicate their movement, the way they transferred their weight, just to be sure. “Surprised to see you here.”